The calculus of conflict

Welcome back, colleagues and students! It is officially the start of the new academic year, and for me, it has been quite the abrupt shift from the summer holiday and office closure. Goodbye languid drinks on a sunny terrace, hello department meetings and student consultations! The September scaries are back :-P

One of the first things that I noticed on my return was how Utrecht and the university have suddenly bloomed. Students walking everywhere, the sounds of the automatic coffee machine in the office kitchens, and queues to my favourite café, The Village. More jarring, however, was looking outside my office window and seeing protesters demanding an end to the Gaza conflict. I had an eerie sense of deja vu and thought: how should I, as an individual and academic, respond to seemingly intractable, unsolvable world affairs?

A recent New York Times article provided me with some direction. It reported that the numbers of casualties from the conflict currently stand at 1,200 Israeli deaths and another 250 missing or abducted from the initial attack, while over 60,000 Palestinians have died since, some of whom have starved. No matter which side you support, these numbers are atrocious, especially since they are likely to grow. When will this war end?

So I did what I usually do when thinking about questions like these, and reached into my technical toolkit. How do I think about this critically, rationally, quantitatively? One number that immediately jumped out was 50:1. At this point in the stalemate, fifty Palestinians have died for every Israeli. And since the conflict continues, this threshold may very well change. I then wondered whether there is a calculus to wars generally: how many people need to die before one or both sides call it quits? Is there some inflexion point or a pain threshold past which one gives in? 

Clearly, this threshold would vary by time and country: at the end of World War II, for example, the US lost about 112,000 soldiers in the Pacific front while Japan lost about 3.1 million soldiers and civilians (including the 140,000-210,000 from the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). That's an equivalence of about 28:1 before the Japanese government surrendered unconditionally, with the last few hundred thousand deaths seemingly the deciding factor. Perhaps for the Japanese, moving past the 26:1 threshold was just too much. For Gaza now, it is at least double that.

This is a very crude way to think about conflict and potentially insensitive or even offensive to those who think life has no price or equivalence. In principle, I agree. But at some level, many would also agree that there is a tipping point beyond which we can no longer tolerate any more loss and suffering. To use some English expressions, this is when we know to "call it quits" or to "cut your losses".

So, both to mark the start of our school year and the 80th anniversary of World War II's end, I invite you to think about what we have learned or not from past and present conflicts and share your thoughts with our university community. Maybe there is no logic or calculus to conflict, but it is a good reminder for us to continue to think about and engage with the world we live in. There is no better place nor time than now.